One problem in our technologic world is that knowledge growth faster than our ethic.
In this article, I’ll try to fill the gap between my technological knowledge and my ethic about vehicles consumption. Hoping that in the same time, you will also learn something and develop a strong awareness.
Among many others, fuel combustion is the main waste in our society:
Imagine you’ve order a burger in fancy restaurant. When it’s coming you have to hurry and you can only have a bite and leave the rest. That’s approximatively what happens with vehicles. Why do we learn as child not to waste food and nothing about energy?
So what happens under the bonnet?
The oil is used in a thermodynamic 4 strokes cycle:
The piston goes down and the cylinder intakes fresh new air from the intake valve.
The piston compresses the air in the top of the cylinder.
Fuel is injected, burned and it heats the compressed air. It gives energy to push the piston and continue the cycle.
When the piston compresses again the cylinder, burned gases are purge by the extract valve.
That’s how we basically the heat capacity of fuel into mechanical work.
The efficiency is obtained when we compare the energy that we can receive from heating the fuel and the mechanical energy (Work [Watt]*Time = Energy [Watt. Hour]). The efficiency of a heat engine is around 35%. In addition to this main source of losses, we have to consider: the idling, driveline, rolling and aerodynamic losses. At the end, the total percentage of energy use to move the vehicle is no more than 15%.
This is strongly wasteful and it seems to me not a scientific method when you try to increase the percentage of renewable energy and in the same time wish the growth of vehicle demand (20 million of new vehicles in China in 2014, amongst many of French, German and American brands)
But our individual responsibility if we know those vehicles are such inefficient, is to use them with frugality. How can we decently use a vehicle alone? A small car weight is around 1300kg, which leads for our approximatively weight of 80kg to an efficiency of less than 1%!
There are some simple alternatives, but so far immediate profits stuck us with this problem.